This spacial installation, made for Mavena, carries the name of my collection of poems which is also the anchoring axis of the exhibition. The gallery space was organicly turned into a contemplative sanctuary for poetry reading.

saint madonna and her grace

tears roll down her marble face

idols skim their shiny skin

saint madonna and her little sin

Jasmina Šarić, the curator of the exhibition, wrote:

“In her recognizable manner, Andrea Resner creates an ambient installation, retaining multimediality and complementing it this time with another form - poetry. Her poems, written in the period from 2013 until today (2022), represent the path of personal healing and facing one's own femininity, while constantly searching for it. Dreams, the imaginary, fictional and personal are intertwined here. Phantom threats are manifested in various forms, animals, things and phenomena.

The central figure of Andrea’s installation is a paper sculpture inspired by the medieval representations of Mary Magdalene, in which she is almost completely (often except for her breasts) covered with hair. It is assumed that this iconography represents the merging of two legends about two Marys - Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt, referring to their stay in the wild during exile and emphasizing their physicality, symbolically depicting the feminine principle of returning to the body. In this sense, the sculpture corresponds to the processes in which poetry is created, and recurring motifs such as butterflies directly symbolize this transformation. Personal transformation - which is constantly present in Andrea's work - is also reflected in the transformation of space. While she talks about the greatness of femininity in a gentle, unobtrusive way, she is using the gallery space invasively, completely occupying and conquering it.

Andrea's expression is full of hyper-femininity and softness in her choice of materials, symbols and colors with which she builds her exhibition. She works with gentle, soft materials like paper, clay and fabric, combining them with materials found in nature. It is in this softness that I recognize the kind of “soft power” of feminism, where softness is used to articulate belonging and resisting the neoliberal and patriarchal logic. In this sense, Andi Schwartz sees softness as a combination of emotionality, vulnerability, relationality and hyper-femininity. She argues that accepting and emphasizing such soft traits (instead of subverting and resisting them) shifts the parameters through which we understand femininity, making it a more inclusive category. Such soft aesthetic, which includes the use of pastel colors and symbols often perceived as girlish, pinpoints the discourse about healing, where healing (which inevitably includes accepting vulnerability and the need to redefine tenderness) is perceived as a kind of resistance, and understanding of femininity as empowering.

"Through an insistence on softness, earnestness, and vulnerability, the femme continues to expand, to be more emotional, to wear more pink, and to further resist masculinist ideals." (Schwartz A., “Soft Femme Theory”)”

Photos by Glorija Lizde.